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Topic: Distributed bond markets and pay-to-policy outputs - page 2. (Read 8569 times)

legendary
Activity: 1596
Merit: 1100
There is one weak point here: you have to trust that the owner of a correctly-attributed bond key will actually construct a valid (protocol wise) bond transaction that transfers control to the owner_pubkey you requested. Given that you're also trusting this person to repay the bond, this is not necessarily a big deal, but it'd be nice to require it.

You have to trust the issuer of a bond to repay it, but you should not have to trust the previous (or any other) owner in any capacity.

This seems like a fair criticism.  There are two parts to a typical bond transfer,

1) Owner #10 must create and sign a well formed BOND message to Owner #11
2) Owner #11 must create and sign bitcoins to Owner #10

Each party is holding something of value, and wants to trade for the other thing.  What does game theory say?  Smiley  Each party's action may be instantly validated, but who goes first?

At this juncture, perhaps some readers may be directed to the just-created Atomic Coin Swapping thread, if they have helpful ideas.

full member
Activity: 126
Merit: 110
Andrew Miller
I don't think the transferable bonds you described are realizable with the limited validation script currently in place. You have come to a different conclusion (that bonds can be implemented right away!), seemingly because of a subtle word-mincing mistake.
The bond, being an asset like any other, is transferable - if you get tired of receiving the repayments you can sell the bond to somebody else.

This output tracks the current owner of the bond. The owner receives the repayments and any accrued interest. Of course a newly issued bond is special, it starts out being owned by the issuer.
If the bond owner wishes to sell the bond, a sale message is broadcast on the exchange p2p network:
....
By scanning the block chain for payments to the current owner of the bond, and checking them against the repayment schedule, the software can automatically calculate which bonds are delinquent and which are mature. Issuers of delinquent bonds would show up in the UI as in debt until sufficient sums were paid to the owners pubkey.


The issuer creates a bond, and is the first person to own it. The owner of a bond is stateful (time-dependent) since ownership changes after the issuer initially sells the bond, and changes again each time it's traded on a secondary market.

There is one weak point here: you have to trust that the owner of a correctly-attributed bond key will actually construct a valid (protocol wise) bond transaction that transfers control to the owner_pubkey you requested. Given that you're also trusting this person to repay the bond, this is not necessarily a big deal, but it'd be nice to require it.

You have to trust the issuer of a bond to repay it, but you should not have to trust the previous (or any other) owner in any capacity. There are two ways to read your statement here:
   1) The "owner of a correctly-attributed bond key" means the issuer. You trust the issuer to repay the bond, so you also trust the issuer to authorize every ownership-transferring transaction - not just the initial transfer from [issuer]->[owner2], but also from [owner2]->[owner3] must be signed by the issuer as well. I don't think you intended for the issuer to be online/in-the-loop for every transfer. The main reason it's unsatisfactory is that the issuer could exercise influence by refusing or delaying to sign later transactions.
   2) The "owner of a correctly-attributed bond key" means the previous the owner. The previous owner signs a transaction transferring the bond over to a new owner. Bonds may be traded many times on secondary markets, without the issuer's intervention. But now the previous owner is not the person you trust to repay the bond, it's just someone you have an ephemeral interaction with. So this weak point is a bigger deal than you suggested.

The problem begins with the restriction you already pointed out, which is that the script can not enforce a relation between the inputs and the outputs.
The second problem is that script cannot contain signatures over anything other than transactions, and only limited forms at that. So you cannot have numeric assertions in outputs because you have no way to verify the inputs are legitimate.

I don't think there is a simple way of expressing this constraint without storing additional state. Here's the easiest way I can think of to create an 'overlay currency', a quantity that can be issued like a bond and where the conservation rule is explicitly validated by blockchain miners.
OP_BOND    // valid in scriptpubkey only (yes this interferes with pruning)
Miners would need to keep an additional table to store the set of active bond IDs. The first time a hash-of-bond-message appears, it's treated as the Issuance, and added to the set. In all subsequent transactions, the rule is that the sum of the OP_BOND quantities (for a given bond-hash) in the scriptpubkeys must match the sum of the quantities in the inputs.
legendary
Activity: 1596
Merit: 1100
Is this the pybond project mentioned at the end of the State of the Coin 2012 slides?

That is one distributed bond effort, yes.

There is no Official Blessed Distributed Bond effort; each developer just scratches their own itch.  In pybond's case, I am writing a basic distributed bond implementation, with no pay-to-policy stuff, just to prove the basics work.

hero member
Activity: 900
Merit: 1014
advocate of a cryptographic attack on the globe
Is this the pybond project mentioned at the end of the State of the Coin 2012 slides?
sr. member
Activity: 966
Merit: 311
What a fun read!

Unfortunately, most readers do not understand the asset, unless mining is involved.

And for that usage they are probably correct in thinking that GLBSE is adequate, for now.
sr. member
Activity: 416
Merit: 277

Sahai-Waters CP-ABE is a recent advance based on pairing-based encryption.

Nice work! Implementing this sort of technology is the way forward.

ByteCoin
legendary
Activity: 2618
Merit: 1007
Wow, thanks a lot for that term (CP-ABE), very insteresting stuff indeed!

Paper:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~bwaters/publications/papers/cp-abe.pdf
legendary
Activity: 1526
Merit: 1134
I've moved the contents of this post to the wiki:

  https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Distributed_markets

and linked it from a re-organized Contracts page.
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